The Guilty Men

Via Ta-Nehisi, Emily Bazelon proposes:

...if we're going to investigate or prosecute anyone, it shouldn't be the agents on the scene. In the wake of Obama's carefully crafted statement fending off prosecution for anyone who relied in good-faith on the DoJ memos, some commentators have called for looking into whether CIA agents could go down for torturing before the memos were written in August 2002. This seems wrong to me. If we went that route, we'd get around version of Abu Ghraib: a few low-level scapegoats standing in for their far more culpable superiors. Much more interesting is another possibility Obama left open: going after the lawyers who wrote the memos and the officials who demanded and approved them--David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Jim Haynes.

But why not Cheney and Bush? They aren't monarchs. They have no more right to flout the rule of law than anyone.